BRADFORD, U.K.—There’s nothing as old-fashioned as a school bell at the Bradford Academy, where the school day starts at 8:30 a.m. with a short, electronic tune. Only seven years old, the school in this West Yorkshire city also boasts a cafeteria called Café Mojo and a massive network of computers accessible to staff and students.

The students at the “all-through school” range in age from 4 to 18. They come to class in uniform. Even the primary kids dress in navy blazers with green piping and dress pants, or navy and green kilts. There are snatches of individuality: some of the upper-year girls pile their hair in massive top knots and a number of the older teenagers sport piercings at odds with their must-wear white shirts and striped ties.

“I didn’t understand some of my kids for the first month, even if I was face to face with them,” says Curtis Brennan, an Ontario-trained teacher from Barrie who is in his second year of teaching in the United Kingdom.

Before he even finished his degree in Arts and Education at Nipissing University, Brennan had lined up a full-time classroom job. In August 2012, he moved to England to teach English.

Struggling with a poor teacher retention rate and, in some districts, an enrolment boom, schools in the United Kingdom have been looking to Commonwealth countries such as Canada to fill the gaps.

In the wake of declining employment prospects in Canada, teacher education grads are moving to austerity-era England to flesh out their resumes, improve future pay prospects and fit in a bit of travel.

In Ontario, first-year unemployment among new graduates grew from 7 per cent in 2008 to 37 per cent in 2012. Exact numbers tracking the trend are hard to come by, but an Ontario College of Teachers employment report states the number of new graduates applying for work outside the province has grown from one in ten in 2011 to one in six last year. Of the graduates who seek work abroad, the largest group, 29 per cent, choose the U.K.

Brennan not only had to quickly learn how the school system works, he had to acclimatize to the Northern accent, which doesn’t exactly sound like something you’d hear on the BBC.

Like other Yorkshire kids, the students at the Bradford Academy use a form of slang unfamiliar to Canadian ears (“in’t” instead of “isn’t it?”). Then there’s the local tradition of banter. Students aren’t the least bit shy when it comes to cracking jokes, even at the expense of adults.

Originally from Barrie, Brennan didn’t even attempt an interview with Simcoe County District, his preferred school board.

For Brennan, there was no question of finding a job outside the classroom. He wanted to teach since coaching younger students in track in field while in high school.

“We always heard that it was going to be five to seven years before we got full-time work,” he said. “I was hearing all along that I wasn’t going to be employed in Ontario so I started looking abroad fairly early.”

Brennan was part of Bradford’s first experiment in sourcing new Canadian teachers for vacancies, though the practice has been going on in and around London and the southeast for decades.

This year, there are 11 Canadian teachers — hailing from as far afield as Oakville to Montague, P.E.I. —at the Bradford Academy, which has 100 teachers on staff.

About five other area schools have followed Bradford’s example. Some 36 Canadian teachers are working in the district.

An entire recruitment industry has grown up around connecting Canadian teachers with British schools. Among the many firms, Engage Education placed more than 300 Canadian teachers in the U.K. at the start of the 2013 school year, with plans to keep sending more. TimePlan Education placed more than 200 teachers in British schools in late August and early September, a number that’s risen by 20 per cent since last year. They also place teachers in the U.K. throughout the rest of the school year.

Classroom Canada, a boutique agency that places Canadians in London schools only, averages 40 teachers per year. Each agency says the bulk of the recruits come from Ontario.

Canadian teachers can go over on a two-year youth mobility visa if they’re under 30, a five-year ancestral visa or indefinitely if they carry a European Union passport.

Starting in April 2012, teachers from Canada, the United States and Australia were automatically awarded Qualified Teacher status without being required to undertake any further training or assessment in the U.K.

Math teachers are particularly in demand. Sean McClelland, a teacher from Oakville also in his second year at the Bradford Academy, initially signed up with an agency that flew him and a group of nine math and science teachers to London to meet with principals, entirely for free.

“I could phone up another school tomorrow and I could be somewhere else in this country in a week,” he says.

Bradford’s executive principal Gareth Dawkins has been on three recruitment trips to Canada, the first two in Toronto, the third across the Maritimes. He was blown away by the calibre of the candidates. Here’s how he baits his hook for Canadians:

“You can either go on the supply list and spend the next umpteen years doing that. Or come across to England, get in a classroom, get on the pitch, learn your practice, stay for two years and you’ll go back a really effective professional. You’ll have had investment in your professional training, then go back.”

Like many cities in the north, Bradford struggled with unemployment in the wake of de-industrialization. Many businesses in the downtown display “get Bradford working” signs.

“I think my board’s view is that we should be giving serious consideration to the local supply of teachers. But there’s a quality question and there’s a community question,” says Dawkins about the delicate issue of local employment.

“The Canadians that we were interviewing, we benchmarked them. Is the Canadian that we can put in the job better than the U.K.-based one? And where it was clearly evident that they were considerably better, we did it.”

When Victoria Westcott speaks at campuses across Canada, she aims to get across the “brutal honesty of what it’s really like” to teach in England. Westcott taught in London schools from 2003 to 2007 before starting the recruitment agency Classroom Canada.

Though some agencies sell it as such, she’s wary of focusing too much on the excitement of living abroad and the possibility of hitting Paris on weekends.

“Of course you’re going to travel, but I explain it as the icing on the cake. The cake, for these guys, is getting a full time job, or working in an inner city school, or being able to actually teach,” she says.

McLelland and Brennan are at ease in the school and among their students. Though their navy blazers blend in with the sea of uniforms (even Bradford teachers must suit up for work), they easily corral students in the cafeteria at the start of the day, chatting away.

But there’s still a steep learning curve. Though the curriculum is fairly similar (Brennan still teaches reading-list constants Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men), the British education system is worlds away from how classrooms are run in Canada.

U.K. teachers are formally assessed by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which performs three formal, in-class observations a year. Compared the Ontario, the work culture is much more inspectorial.

Brennan and McClelland also teach more students per day than they would in Canada, thanks to a “waterfall” system that exposes students to more subjects in a day. That translates into more marking and lesson planning.

Though McLelland and Brennan contend being a new teacher is tough, regardless of where you are, others suggest there’s a fundamental difference between the classroom behaviour of U.K. and Canadian kids.

“They’re tough kids, there’s no doubt about it. Especially in London, you just have to know the culture of the classroom that you’re in,” says Westcott.

As for cultural differences, McClelland believes a Canadian kid dropped in a U.K. school would be shell-shocked at his or her new peers.

“They’ve had so many years of bantering so they’re quite quick,” he says. “I’d say for the first couple of months the kids were getting the best of us with the jokes. But now we’ve had some practice and we’re back on top.”

The paycheque in England is certainly not a main reason for going abroad. Had McLelland been hired full-time by the Halton District board in his hometown of Oakville, he would have been making a minimum of $44,272 in his probationary year as a secondary school teacher. The minimum for the main pay range for teachers working in England and Wales (excluding the London area) currently starts at £21,804, about $35,000 Canadian.

The lure of full-time work is especially appealing for Ontarians, where the provincial government recently enacted a new regulation that ushered in a seniority system for hiring “long-term occasional” teachers.

The gamble of going abroad means losing out on a place on that supply list and putting in the time before they can apply for full-time positions. But Brennan and McLelland believe that their full-time experience in the U.K. will place them higher on the pay scale when they move back home. There’s also the issue of professional growth that comes with having your own class.

“I would be making more if I were supplying five days a week at home,” says McLelland. “But I’d rather take that hit to progress as a teacher.”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.